It is difficult to get accurate data on the number of empty housing units in the United States. Recent estimates suggest that approximately 18 million, or almost 11%, of homes in the United States are unoccupied[1. This is a full time statistic and does not include vacation/part time homes that may be vacant some of […]
Tag: development
Universal Design and Aging In Place
In communities across the United States, older adults find themselves displaced every day. No longer able to stay in their homes, they shuffle through a series of facilities offering varying levels of care and support, many of which start to seem more like warehouses than homes and actual places to live. They are forced to […]
Annals of Bad City Planning
If you hunt extremely vigorously through the City of Fort Bragg’s website, you will find the proposed citywide design guidelines that got unveiled at City Council last week, because someone kindly scanned, or possibly photographed, them and converted the resulting mess into a .pdf document. Should you peruse this meticulously laid-out hodge podge of bad […]
Think Before You Develop
Here in Fort Bragg, there has been much kerfuffle of late over the new aquatic centre. For those not familiar with the ins and outs of small town doings, the aquatic centre was in the planning phases for an extremely long time (I want to say over a decade, because I remember people coming into […]
Historic Preservation, Ethics, and Communities
Mendocino is a bit of a posterchild for historic preservation, as we know[1. Or maybe we don’t, I suppose that depends on numerous factors like where you live and how long you’ve been reading this website, actually.]; the town made a conscious decision to prioritise the maintenance of a particular character and presentation and it […]
The Best Brick Is the Brick You’ve Got
One of the things that has always bugged me about a lot of the certification programs intended to designate specific structures as ‘green’ is that they tend to focus entirely on new construction and new development. It’s about what new materials you can use to be environmentally friendly, how new designs can be made better, […]
Now Is the Time for Long Term Thinking
One of the interesting consequences of the economic…whatever it is…has been a shift in conversations about what to do with the mill site. Not that long ago, everyone seemed very proactive with big plans and schemes, and a lot of that seems to have dropped off the radar. People are less ambitious and less sure […]
Environmental Issues: We’re In the Shit Now, Folks
One of the books I read during the Book Project that left an unexpected legacy was Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. Although the book was primarily about the rise of the bottled water industry, one of the things it touched upon was the fact that water processing facilities for municipal water are growing increasingly outdated and […]